Light like a deck of cards,
Hard and glossy and white…

—García Lorca (1898-1936),
from Gypsy Ballads

By Stuart Mitchner

In the weekly lottery of births, deaths, and events, August 19 resembles a hand from Lorca’s deck. After formally noting that on that date in 1936, the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca was murdered by nationalist assassins, along with the fact that future president William Jefferson Clinton was born on the same date exactly 10 years later, we begin in Rome with the dedication of the first temple to Venus in 295 BC. As for notable births, we vault from John Dryden in 1631 (What passion cannot music raise and quell!) to the arrival in 1939 of the most passionate of drummers, Cream’s flame-haired Ginger Baker (1936-2019).

On Fire

I’ll never forget the night in March 1968 when I saw a man whose hair appeared to be on fire driving a set of drums like a team of wild horses. So deep was he in the “torrent, tempest, and whirlwind of passion,” that if someone with prophetic knowledge had assured me that the demon flailing away as if each moment might be his last would not only live through the night but for another 51 years, I’d have thought they were mad. In his autobiography Hellraiser (2010), Baker admits to being fascinated as a boy by the firey visuals of the London bombings and V-2 rockets, claiming “at no time was I afraid. I loved the explosions.”

Elvis as President

Back in the 1990s, morning-radio host Don Imus sometimes had then-president Bill Clinton on his show — as voiced by an Elvis Presley impersonator. Besides being a devoted Elvis fan and playing the saxophone, the man in the White House famously lived up to his temple-to-Venus birthright. It’s also necessary to point out that he was born on August 19, 1947, two months and five days after the current resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, both of whom are marking their 80th birthdays this year.

The only time I saw Clinton in the flesh was when he gave a speech at a campaign event in August 2004. My over-the-top news coverage — that the man “is swimming in charisma, has been through the valley of the shadow, suffered the slings and arrows of Lewinsky and emerged with his head and his ratings high” — set off a brief shouting match with a Clinton-hating colleague, who took particular exception to this paragraph:

“What would really rile his enemies is that he’s obviously happy, even cocky. He’s smooth and down to earth at the same time. The Bill-haters would say ‘slick.’ Cool and easygoing as an Arkansas Bing Crosby, he makes his points as if he were talking to a bunch of bikers in a bar but without in the least forcing it or speaking under the heads or high-brows of his well-heeled audience.”

Clinton and Sex

Bill Clinton’s My Life (2004) is one of my three favorite books about recent American presidents, along with Ronald Reagan’s Where’s The Rest of Me? (1965) and Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father (1995). Some passages of the book are worth sharing on the president’s 80th birthday. For readers desirous of intimate glimpses of the Clintons in the summer of 1998 when their marriage was on the line and impeachment was looming, there are two passages, one on either end of the story. The first is at Martha’s Vineyard following his admission to his wife of the awful truth, that in fact he did have “immoral relations with that woman” — “I spent the first couple of days alternating between begging for forgiveness and planning strikes on al Qaeda. At night Hillary would go up to bed and I would sleep on the couch.” After 45 pages detailing his resistance to the flak from the House Republicans: “I almost wound up being grateful to my tormentors. They were probably the only people who could have made me look good to Hillary again. I even got off the couch.”

Lorca and Cigarettes

I found this quote accompanying an Instagram snapshot of Lorca lighting up,: “The poem, the song, the picture, is only water drawn from the well of the people, and it should be given back to them in a cup of beauty so that they may drink … and in drinking understand themselves.”

Following the theme of cigarettes, I consulted Leslie Stainton’s Lorca, A Dream of Life and found that on the night of his arrest, he had been given a carton of Camels by a friend. At the time, he was wearing “dark gray pants and a white shirt with a tie loosely tied around the collar.” When he demanded to know why he was being arrested, he was told that he’d “done more damage with his pen than others with a pistol.”

Two nights later Lorca was handcuffed and driven to a small building six miles from Granada with a schoolteacher and two bullfighters known for left-wing politics. The poet offered the last of his Camels to a young guard who was on duty that night while asking if he could have a newspaper and “more tobacco.” After humoring him with small talk, the guard told Lorca that he and the other three were going to be killed. The sun had not yet risen when they were shot beside a stand of olive trees and buried in a nearby ravine.

Sunsets in Granada

From Lorca’s “Sunsets”: “When the sun vanishes behind the mountains of mist and rose, and the atmosphere fills with a vast symphony of religious devotion, Granada bathes in gold and pink and purple tulle. The Vega, its wheat fields already parched, sleeps in a yellow and silver stupor, while the distant skies hold bonfires of passionate purple and gentle ochre.”

Clinton’s Sunset

In the summer of 1997, when the Lewinsky scandal was no more than a gleam in the eye of the press, the 10 July 1997 Independent reported (“Clinton Relives the Memory of Spain’s Ultimate Sunset”): “Bill Clinton had one piece of business to complete before leaving Spain after this week’s Nato summit: to visit Granada to show Hillary and Chelsea “the most beautiful sunset in the world.” As dusk fell, he stood “with his wife and daughter to watch the last rays of the sun glow on the snowy peaks of the Sierra Nevada, turning the city violet and making the ancient Moorish Alhambra palace appear suspended in the air.”

Clinton had first visited Granada during his time as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, and had been so stunned by its beauty that he resolved one day to return. “It was the same time in the evening, the same light, the same colours. Everything is the same, exactly as I remember it,” said Mr Clinton, and added, with a little nostalgic half-smile: “Except me: I’m older.” To journalists who tried to ask him questions, he said: “Don’t work today — just watch.”